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daemonburrito (1026186) writes "Richard Stallman made an appearance at a presentation in Brisbane by the EPO's Ralf Abbing, briefly interrupting him. He carried a sign that read "Don't get caught in software patent thickets", and distributed pamphlets.

Stallman told iTnews, "We're here at the World Computer Congress and what I've discovered is that the European Patent Office is here to campaign in favour of software patents in Australia"."Link to Original Source

Excerpta Medica, a "strategic medical communications agency", is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine", it published a number of other "journals".

daemonburrito (1026186) writes "The BBC reports that the six largest ISPs in the UK have agreed to a deal with the trade group British Phonographic Industry, assisted by government arbitration. Under the reported terms of the deal, the ISPs will begin mailing notices to subscribers identified by the BPI, and aim for a "significant reduction" in music sharing. Hundreds of thousands of notices are expected."Link to Original Source

When asked about the cost to webmasters for the extra traffic, and of concerns about making their logs useless, AVG research chief Roger Thompson replied: '[...] if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.'

While this may seem reminiscent of the FasterFox problems, a major difference is that FasterFox will honor a robots.txt directive."Link to Original Source

daemonburrito (1026186) writes "A group of physicists has demonstrated a cooling technique which may soon allow the study of gravity waves, a look into the boundary between quantum and classical physics, quantum-state engineering in macroscopic systems, "observation of non-classical correlations between macroscopic objects", and last but not least, "new means for integrated quantum (mechanical) information processing."
For the lay, from NewScientist :
"This week, three teams of physicists have perfected a way of doing this (Nature, vol 444, p 67). Their technique is to bombard a mirror of roughly 10^14 atoms with photons in a way that damps out thermal vibrations, cooling it to 135 millikelvin."
For others: The juicier abstract as published in Nature, and the paper as published on arXiv.org."